Authors: Josh Lanyon
Stranger Things Have Happened: An Adrien English Write Your Own Damn Story (The Adrien English Mysteries) (9 page)
After this you start to see Jean Paul as a person rather than simply a strong back and a muscular pair of arms.
You’re not sure what Jean Paul sees when he looks at you — other than a patient with SCI and a weak heart. It’s impossible for you to believe that anyone would want you now, so you feel safe opening up to him about things you wouldn’t share with anyone else. He’s surprisingly easy to talk to. Maybe it’s a French thing, but Jean Paul seems absolutely unshockable.
At first Jean Paul is just a sympathetic and sensible listener, but eventually he opens up to you as well, talking about his childhood in Provence, working in the vineyards, his immigration problems, and the challenges of being a gay man in the nursing profession.
“Are you in a relationship?” you ask him one morning when he’s taking your blood pressure.
“Non,”
Jean Paul says absently, reminding you of your old friend Claude. “I am, as you would say, married to my work.” He teases, “I am married to you, Adrien.”
Jean Paul pumps the blood pressure cuff, looks surprised at the reading, and meets your eyes. You feel yourself blushing, though you try to tell yourself you were just making
la
conversation.
Later you lie in the bathtub, while Jean Paul bathes your motionless body. Not entirely motionless as your chest does continue to rise and fall, whether you like it or not. It is so strange to see him lift your foot and scrub the sole with the little clear nail brush, but feel nothing. The scented water laps against you, the bubbles snap and dissipate against your pale skin, but it could all be happening to someone else. Your body doesn’t even look like your body anymore. You close your eyes because you hate the sight of the useless carcass that is you.
When you open your eyes again, Jean Paul is holding your cock in his well-shaped hand and gently washing you. He handles you like you are beautiful and precious, and it is infuriating that you cannot feel his touch. But then a crazy thing happens. Your cock hardens.
You still can’t feel it — and your erection doesn’t last — but Jean Paul looks at you and smiles widely. “Oh ho
ho
,” he says. It is a distinctly French sound.
You laugh. “I wish —”
You don’t finish the thought, but Jean Paul studies you with his bright blue eyes.
“Moi aussi,”
he says softly.
Your relationship changes subtly but importantly after this, and you begin to spend more and more time with Jean Paul. When he mentions looking for a new apartment, you suggest to Lisa that you would like Jean Paul to be around more, and she invites him to move into the Porter Ranch house as your fulltime “companion.”
It’s a nice old-fashioned word to cover up the fact that your former friends and acquaintances don’t have time for you now. Or maybe Lisa keeps them away. Sometimes you would prefer to believe that.
Anyway, Jean Paul agrees — probably because Lisa bribes him heavily with free room and board on top of his already generous salary.
You tell yourself you’re a realist. You know this is a paid gig for Jean Paul, but he’s kind and attentive and you have to take what you can get. You’re grateful. Mostly. Sometimes you’re resentful, and unlike Jean Paul, you’re not always kind. But Jean Paul doesn’t seem to mind.
You quickly become inseparable. Which only means he knows what side of the bread his butter is on.
One autumn afternoon Jean Paul takes you out into the garden and lifts you out of your chair, lying beside you on the green grass and golden leaves. It’s wonderful. The grass tickles your neck and the earth smells warm and alive. Jean Paul kisses you sweetly and then he spends the next half hour making love to you.
Before your accident you would never have believed how much pleasure could come from having your face and hair caressed. Jean Paul gives you butterfly kisses with his eyelashes and nibbles on your ears and sucks on your lower lip. At the same time his hand moves slowly and patiently on your cock. You can’t feel it and yet you’re enjoying the experience. You enjoy it more when his face tightens and you watch him come with a quiet, ferocious intensity.
“Mon Dieu!”
he gasps. It’s not at all corny, though it should be. He buries his face against you and says something. The words are muffled, but it almost sounded like he says,
“Je t’aime, je t’aime…”
“What?”
He raises his head, smiles at you, and goes back to working your cock, which is now startlingly erect. Jean Paul chuckles and kisses the head of your cock as though it is his little
bon
ami
. After a time, you experience a prolonged, almost euphoric sense of relaxation… It’s hard to describe, but you know exactly what it is.
You’ve had an orgasm. The first one since your accident two years earlier. You didn’t think that was possible, but Jean Paul kisses your trembling mouth and damp eyes and earnestly explains about “transfer orgasm” and “neural plasticity.”
You pretend to listen to him, but the only thing that really sticks is the memory of his soft, broken words.
“Je t’aime, je t’aime…”
S
ERIOUSLY? You have a heart condition and you decide to give chase to a masked prowler in a deserted alley only days after one of your friends was carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey?
I don’t think so.
__________
T
hen Arlok contemptuously flings you away from him. As you stagger backward, Arlok’s tentacle lashes upward and levels upon you. Once more the twin tips glow brilliant green and livid blue. Instantly every muscle in your body is paralyzed. You stand there as rigid as a statue, your body completely deadened from the neck down. Beside you, Jake is also frozen motionless by that same weird power.
“Earthling, you are beginning to try my patience,” Arlok snaps. “Can you not realize that I am utterly invincible in any combat with you? The living metal of my body weighs over sixteen hundred pounds, as you measure weight. The strength inherent in that metal is sufficient to tear a hundred of your Earth men to shreds. But I do not even have to touch you to vanquish you. The electric content of my bodily structure is so infinitely superior to yours that with this tentacle-organ of mine I can instantly short-circuit the feeble currents of your nerve impulses and bring either paralysis or death as I choose.
“But enough of this!” Arlok breaks off abruptly. “My materials are now ready, and it is time that I finished my work. I shall put you out of my way for a few hours until I am ready to send you through the Gate to the laboratories of Xoran.”
The green-and-blue fire of the tentacle’s tips flames to dazzling brightness. The paralysis of your body sweeps swiftly over your brain. Black oblivion engulfs you.
“Adrien! Psst! ADRIEN!”
You open your eyes.
“You’re doing it again,” Jake whispers. “Not that the blue-and-green tentacle-organ thing doesn’t have some real possibilities, but if you really want to try something kinky, I have a suggestion…”
Y
our hands are shaking as you phone your local police department and report the assault.
You’re half prepared for them to blow you off, especially given that you’re a suspect in Riordan’s murder investigation, but that doesn’t happen. That very evening two plainclothes detectives arrive and take your report. You’re still angry and humiliated and you give them the complete and unvarnished truth of everything that has occurred between you and Detective Riordan since the moment he walked into your bookstore.
From that point on, things happen very quickly and even if you wanted to stop the unraveling sequence of events, you couldn’t.
Riordan is removed from the Gay Slasher case and Chan is partnered with a junior detective by the name of Alonzo. Chan still believes you’re their perp, but despite the two of them doing their very best to measure you for a pair of stainless steel bracelets, they can’t come up with enough evidence for an arrest.
Through the grapevine you learn that Riordan has been suspended from LAPD, and then a few weeks later, you hear he’s been arrested for Robert’s murder. Once IA started investigating him, the trail led straight to his extracurricular activities and it turned out he had a couple of encounters with Robert at an unsavory club called Ball and Chain.
Eventually he’s convicted of Robert’s murder and sent to San Quentin.
You’re not sure if he killed Robert or not, but he seemed to have a lot of faith in the system, so hopefully he feels justice was done.
A few nights after you learn of Riordan’s sentencing, you’re working alone in the back room of the bookstore when a man wearing a skull mask and wielding a butcher’s knife bursts in. You’re cornered in the stock room. You try tipping a bookshelf on your assailant, but there’s no escape. As the knife plunges into your chest the first time, you wonder what former detective Riordan is doing this evening…
Y
ou end up going for a drink at a little Scottish-themed pub. It’s a quiet little place with red-and-black tartan carpet and blackened beams. You settle in a large leather booth in the back and order a Drambuie.
Bruce — yes, you’re on a first-name basis now — surprises you by confessing that he’s
not
going to write “your” story for
Boytimes
because LAPD has another prime suspect in mind now. His interest in you is purely personal.
You’re flattered. Mostly. You’re also startled. It’s been a long time since another man has shown a personal interest in you. In fairness, you haven’t made it easy for anyone to show an interest in you. In fact, you’re probably well on your way to turning into one of those weird, old, eccentric book collectors — and you’re only thirty-two. You haven’t had a date in eight months.
Bruce is attractive in an awkward but well-groomed way. Okay, he wears Giorgio for Men, but nobody’s perfect. At least he’s open and honest about his interest. In fact, he admits he’s been looking into your background. Which would be a little creepy if he wasn’t a reporter and hadn’t been planning to do an article on you.
“Am I coming on too strong?” he asks. “I feel like there’s kind of a connection between us. I felt it that first day. At the funeral. Is it just me?”
The truth is, you’re not sure. You did feel a kind of recognition when you first saw him.
Anyway, you finish your Drambuie and then you go home and you spend a few hours drinking and thinking, which is how you spend a lot of evenings. Only tonight your thoughts are about Robert and who might have killed him.
Tara certainly had motive. Robert abandoned her and his kids in order to run off and “find himself.” Plus, she is the beneficiary of his big, fat, life insurance policy.
Claude seems to be nursing both a broken heart and some bitter feelings. Plus he’s acting totally guilty.
Then there was that mystery man Robert had been seeing in the weeks before his death.
And there is Detective Riordan. If Claude is right and Riordan did run into Robert at that leather club, well…it’s a possibility, right? Not a possibility you want to think about…
And maybe right there, that’s worth noting.
__________
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Y
ou’re not sure why you decide to keep your mouth shut. Partly it’s embarrassment, of course. Having to explain to Riordan’s fellow police officers that you propositioned him? What if they agree with his reaction? What if they don’t believe you? And even if they do, you’d maybe have to testify at a hearing or a trial? Oh hell no.
But partly…
You’re sorry for Riordan. As crazy as that sounds — and is — you’re sorry for him. You feel sick when you remember the terrified confusion in his eyes. He looked like a trapped animal.
So you don’t file assault charges. You keep your mouth shut.
You don’t see Riordan for several days. You don’t hear anything from the cops at all. But then, after you discover that the lunatic who broke into your shop left a dead cat hidden in the stock room, Chan shows up with Riordan in tow.
You explain the situation and Riordan and Chan exchange The Look. Once again it is painfully clear they don’t believe you. They think you’ve concocted this sick scenario to throw suspicion off yourself. They must think you’re a complete moron, and that makes you even angrier than them thinking you’re a killer.
“If people would be candid to start with, it would help,” is all Chan responds to your angry outburst.
“
I’m
not being candid? I am a victim here. I am being stalked.”
“Run that by me again,” Riordan requests. It’s the first time he manages to meet your gaze directly.